Linda Karshan

Linda Karshan (b. 1947, Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American-born artist known for drawings and prints in which line, rhythm and repetition record the physical process of making. Her spare, predominantly monochromatic works are built through a highly disciplined method involving breath, movement, counting and the repeated turning of the paper.

Karshan studied at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, from 1965 to 1967, at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1967 to 1968, and at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1969. In 1983 she completed an MA in Humanistic Psychology at the Antioch Centre for British Studies in London. Her thesis, Play, Creativity and the Birth of the Self, explored D. W. Winnicott’s ideas about play, transitional space and creativity, themes which subsequently became closely connected with her artistic practice.

During the early 1990s Karshan’s work became increasingly structured, and in 1994 she developed the method she describes as her “inner choreography”. Drawing becomes a physical sequence in which each mark is linked to her breathing, the movement of her body, the counter-clockwise rotation of the sheet and the counting of regular intervals. Rather than working towards a predetermined image, Karshan allows the work to emerge through this repeated process.

The resulting drawings often consist of intersecting lines, grids, crosses, squares and loosely ordered sequences of marks. Her interest in number and proportion has also been informed by her reading of Plato and by the idea of an underlying mathematical order. The apparent simplicity of the finished works therefore records a complex interaction between movement, duration, concentration and structure.

Printmaking has developed in parallel with her drawing. Etching allows Karshan to translate the same vocabulary of line and repetition into a different medium, while retaining the sense of sequence and bodily movement central to her work. Performance has also become increasingly important, extending the act of drawing into architectural and public space.

Karshan has held solo museum exhibitions at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, and Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, in 2002; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, in 2003; and Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, Germany, in 2013. In 2018 her exhibition Equilibrio: Art, Architecture & Sacred Geometry in Conversation was held at the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.

More recent exhibitions and projects have continued this exploration of drawing, movement and geometry. In 2022 a survey of her work was presented at the Domus Comeliana in Pisa. In 2023 her work was included in Triangles within a Square: Art and Mathematics at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs. In 2024 she exhibited in Josef and Anni Albers, Iconic Couple of Modernism at the Boghossian Foundation, Villa Empain, Brussels, where she also presented the performance drawing Linda Swim II. That year her work was also shown in Legacies and Visions from Comel to Karshanat the Domus Comeliana, Pisa.

In 2025–26 Karshan presented De Humana Mensura at the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, her first exhibition in the Italian capital. The exhibition brought together works from Italian and international collections and explored her long-standing engagement with proportion, the body and ideas of human and cosmic order.

Karshan also has a significant relationship with The Courtauld. In memory of her husband, the collector Howard Karshan, she presented the Gallery with an important group of modern and post-war drawings by artists including Cézanne, Kandinsky, Klee, Michaux, Baselitz and Cy Twombly. The gift was celebrated in Modern Drawings: The Karshan Gift, which opened at The Courtauld in 2021. Her association with the institution has continued, including collaboration with The Courtauld on the 2026 study programme Disegno: Workshop Tradition, Concept, and Living Practice in Pisa.

Her work is held in major public collections including the British Museum, Tate, the Arts Council Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern and Museum Folkwang.

Karshan has exhibited with The Redfern Gallery since the 1990s and continues to be included in the gallery’s contemporary programme.

Linda Karshan is represented by The Redfern Gallery.